another night or day

I got to a pretty good state for awhile yesterday waking up after midnight and going from the endless night of despair into the day instead of trying to get up in the afternoon in despair and seeing things just get darker.

I thought maybe I was on the right track. But, waking up at 3 a.m. today (a favorite time of day) it seems just too dark. I think I was having one of those dreams that was just a true and graphic account of my lack of place in the world. Maybe it was better yesterday when it was all running and hiding and people being shot in the head.

But the part I remember was ending on a somewhat lighter side of trouble. After all, I found a place to pee for a change (well, it was off a sidewalk, but I didn’t think anyone was around), and did so quite easily. (I thought maybe because my penis was particularly short at the time.) So the walk was going along okay into the grey color field, skies and sidewalks and buildings.

But a vehicle starts pacing me, then falls behind, and someone is talking.. I have to turn around to see that it’s a cop car. What luck. He wants to know what’s going on or something, I say “you tell me. what do you want?” Well, it turns out he doesn’t say anything about indecent exposure, or anything of a legal nature as far as I can tell. He’s just harassing me about my life in general, and leading to, “You let yourself go bald.” As I was trying to say in a scoffing tone (don’t talk back to the cops, kids) “That’s not something one has much choice about” I woke up. And here we are, with the imaginary correspondents again.

Writing while walking (and standing)

In Your Way

the dreams of sisyphus

this was tonight’s FaceBook status, which will give you a good idea of why I should just keep to myself. This is not really written, it’s ejaculated. If were to come back and re-write, maybe I would put in something about how beautiful the stone and the grain and complexity and the beauty of the drawing upon it and the magic of it’s transmogrification and transmission were to me. though, if the images couldn’t do that, though, what use are mere words.

What’s on my mind? The dream I had last night: another return to the lithography shop. I keep finding myself back there, in spite of the incalculable threat to my back condition, the increasingly insurmountable time and money challenges, and the general hostility and toxicity of the art school environment. Always trying to sneak in a few hours at the end of a semester when no one is looking. searching for that large stone with the drawing I’ve been working on for 10 years (which in reality is in my basement, far too far from a press) and wondering if it has survived. (the teacher had a tendency to hand my stones out to other students to grind off and re-use even if I still had an image on them.) I have even had a dream where I was lying down and hugging a litho stone. but, this was a real shop dream full of technical details and difficulties. first, the drawing looked a little pale and the surface looked kind of liquid. wait! has the teacher gone ahead and etched it? No, wait, I remembered, I did get around to doing a first etch. so, it was at that crucial stage where the drawing had to be washed out with solvent through the gum mask, and some idiot at the sink sloshes water over it which dissolves the gum arabic, except for the adsorbed film, making it impossible to rub in the thin asphaltum base before inking it… not to mention the bits of carborundum grit in the graining sink water… so, great difficulties but still something more than I have left in my real life where I hardly even feel like heating up that frozen dinner tonight.

Anyway, then I was trying to get some help moving the stone from the sink to a table to try to roll it up anyway, and asking someone (over and over and over) to please bring the fork-lift over, and this Tarzan-like guy was going to help me shove it over. “Don’t pick it up”, says I. He starts to pick up his side. “”DON’T PICK IT UP!!!” I suggest gently. (the way to move a 200+ lb. stone is to slide and shove it.) So, he picks it up, and I’m stuck holding up my side as well until I can convince him to gently set it down again. (the stones are brittle and fragile as well as heavy.) I woke up with my back aching, barely able to straighten up.


 Well, then again, a couple days ago I had a dream I was eating Cheetos. That longing, anyway, I was able to fulfill. (they don’t make ’em like they used to, though.)